Christopher Hitchens On Losing His Voice To Cancer

“Deprivation of the ability to speak is more like an attack of impotence, or the amputation of part of the personality. To a great degree, in public and private, I ‘was’ my voice. … Now, if I want to enter a conversation, I have to attract attention in some other way, and live with the awful fact that people are then listening ‘sympathetically’.”

Why Facts Seem To Have Fallen Out Of Our Public Discourse

“They have been able to succeed, in part, because most academics who retain a commitment to intellectual scrupulousness have lost the ability to speak beyond their narrow disciplines to the larger public. At the same time, the growth of right-wing talk radio, cable news, and a bevy of well-funded think tanks… have overwhelmed what remains of their less ideologically committed counterparts.”

The Biggest Little Bookshop In India (It’s Called ‘Giggles’)

Bookseller Nalini Chettur founded Giggles – a one-hundred-square-foot stall on the edge of a hotel in Chennai (formerly Madras) – in 1974 with an investment of 1,000 rupees (then about $130). She and her store are now “a pillar of Chennai’s English-language literary scene,” visited by everyone from Satyajit Ray to Jan Morris to visit Israeli dance scholars.